Sick leave legislation is good for employees - and employers

Published 6:36 pm, Thursday, June 2, 2011

Last week, the Connecticut state Senate, by a single vote, 18-17, passed historic legislation requiring businesses with 50 or more workers to offer employees paid sick time.

The significance of this landmark legislation -- passed in the face of implacable, lock-step opposition from big business lobbyists and local Republicans -- can hardly be overestimated. If passed by the state House, Governor Dannel Malloy has promised to sign the measure, which would make Connecticut the first state in the nation to offer paid sick days, a major step forward for public health and worker rights. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research has pointed out, the United States remains the only one of 22 top industrialized countries that fails to guarantee sick workers some form of paid sick leave.

The absence of a paid sick leave policy at the state and federal level has had tremendously deleterious effects on workers, essentially forcing them to choose between keeping their jobs or protecting their own (or their own families') health. This is not a choice that workers, particularly low-wage workers in service industries, should have to face in an advanced industrialized nation that professes to care about the welfare of its citizens.

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A paid sick leave policy would have immense benefits. Currently, about 553,000 Connecticut workers lack paid sick days -- many of them women. As women remain the primary caregivers in their families, and tend to lose more work time to care for sick children, a paid sick leave policy would allow them the time to recover from illness, instead of having to come to work sick, and put us all at risk.

Opponents of sick leave legislation, including the entire Greenwich delegation to Hartford, have predictably painted the bill as a jobs-killer, and as another expensive government mandate that will cause businesses to flee the state. No evidence, of course, is ever advanced for this dubious and fear-mongering claim. When sick leave legislation came up for a vote in 2009, our local representatives stooped to standard Republican ideology in seeking to defeat it. In an exuberantly written but poorly argued joint Op-Ed in Greenwich Time, state Reps. Fred Camillo, Livvy Floren and Lile Gibbons wrote "Democrats use businesses as cash-laden piñatas at which they blindly flail their anti-business sticks. Instead, the state should be doing everything possible to retain existing businesses ... that's the way we grow jobs, increase revenue, and create a positive bottom line."

Leaving aside the colorful hyperbole, will sick leave legislation actually harm employers? The evidence suggests otherwise. A report released in 2010 from the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, D.C., shows that implementing a paid sick leave bill would actually save Connecticut businesses nearly $73 million each year in reduced workforce turnover and the prevention of communicable diseases such as influenza. As Jon Green, executive director of Connecticut Working Families, a key proponent of the bill, has noted, "Lobbyists who claim paid sick days legislation is costly simply haven't done the math."

Another study published in March 2011 by the Economic Policy Institute reached a similar conclusion, as noted by the 16 Connecticut economists who penned an Op-Ed in Greenwich Time and The Advocate (May 20) supporting paid sick leave legislation. They concluded, "the research is clear: paid sick days are smart business."

San Francisco was one of the first municipalities in the country to pass sick leave legislation in 2006. Five years later, none of the doomsday scenarios predicted by corporate lobbyists -- for example, that scores of businesses would flee the city - have come to pass. Studies show that 70 percent of employers now support the requirement, with employer associations calling it "the best public policy for the least cost." There is every reason to think that Connecticut businesses will be able to adapt to the new law.

If enacted, paid sick leave legislation would send the message that employees deserve to be treated like human beings when they (or their families) are sick, and that giving them the time to recover is the civilized thing to do, instead of having to come to work sick, and endanger the health of their co-workers.

Due to the hard work of thousands of Connecticut residents, and the efforts of diligent Democratic legislators (and one brave Republican legislator, John Kissel), paid sick leave legislation is close to becoming a reality. Residents of the Nutmeg State should be proud to enact such common sense progressive legislation that benefits employers and employees alike.